August 25, 2012

Trees whizzed by, the village scene soon turned into vast swamps with the back-ground of barely visible hillocks.

Mira looked out of the window, unseeing.

Her mind was pre-occupied.

She was unaware that the elderly lady, sitting in front of her, was looking for some conversation. It has been an hour since the train started and Mira hasn’t noticed anything about the compartment after finding her seat number and plopping into it.

She finally did it. Filed for divorce. She was supposed to feel lighter, only she didn’t. The thing that was unclenched inside her for some days now is still the same, if anything, it only wound tighter.

***

He took the Coke can out of the fridge and took a few swigs. He didn’t want it to be alcohol that did the reboot.

Then he took the stairs to check on his sleeping son. The photo-frames on the wall now seemed like haunting ghosts he wanted to avoid. He ditched his customary habit of looking at them. Why did people have photos in which they are only smiling? Are they spreading good cheer? Did everyone want to be continuously reminded that he has to try and be happy at all times in his life?

How I wish there was a bawling picture of Mira in one of those frames, he thought acidly.

Great, now the whole thing is making him delusional, Anand thought. Seriously, who would want to have crying pictures framed and displayed? He must be close to losing it, he thought sadly.

From the small slit under the door, he could see that the light which had been on till a moment ago is now switched off. He waited a moment outside the door and knocked it as he entered.

Varun was tucked in his bed, but was awake. He looked at his Dad as he came in, switched on the bed-light and sat up.

“So kiddo, what do you want me to read today?” he asked as he put an arm around his son and absent-mindedly ruffled his hair.

“Nothing Pappa, I just want to...”he trailed off.

Anand understood what he meant. Though he was unsure how much of the divorce process Varun really understood. At 6, he was too young to grasp such things. Things that baffled Anand too, funnily.

Anand pulled Varun closer to his chest and held him.

“Not even Harry Potter?” he suggested slowly.

“Nope,” came the little voice.

Before separation, Mira and Anand tried to talk to Varun, about their divorce and how it would affect him, in the usual language they reserve for their 6-year old.

Varun took in everything calmly.

Some of Varun’s friends were kids with divorced parents, but how much personal connect he is feeling towards the whole situation was beyond them. They felt responsible and guilty for having to put him through this at such an age, but it was inevitable. At this point, both thought the marriage was irreparable.

Mira, who usually camouflaged her feelings pretty well when she was with Anand, couldn’t stop her guilt from spilling into these pre-divorce talks with Varun. Knowing that she was throwing three lives into very different patterns, she often became emotional and hugged Varun fiercely.

Much more so, ever since Varun told Mira his wish - to stay with Anand.

She was not expecting that at all. She could fight in courts and mothers usually win the custody battles but that would hurt Varun, he would end up resenting her and she didn’t want that.

It meant she only has weekends to spend time with her darling son. She was devastated.

Anand hadn’t seen it coming either, and was speechless when he learnt that he is now going to be a single father. He thought that three of them had made a great team.

Until...

***

It was hard to put a finger when this exactly started.

Life was good with Anand. He was working hard for a career promotion and she was the dependable anchor, putting everything in place at home, taking care of Varun and other things. No complaints, no disappointments.

But no absolute content either.

Surely, there is nothing wrong with having guy-friends, Mira reasoned. Especially, if they are your childhood-friends, who are almost always utmost loyal and wonderful people.

It all started six months back..

Mira let her thoughts wander to their rendezvous after twelve years. She smiled slowly with her lips closed.

She last saw Nirav in high –school. He was 14 and she was 12 and he was the handsome senior every girl openly pined for.

Now, she was happily married and was a stay-at-home Mom with a kid.

Nirav had seen her getting into a car after grocery shopping at Godrej’s and followed her at an impulse. If his guess was right, she is the same Mira, who was the science club president in school. Nerdy and outgoing, she was too bright for most of the unabashed teens who tried for her. She side-stepped them expertly and basically breezed through middle-school without ever making it to the gossip club.

Which is to say that she stayed single.

Mira with her serious demeanour did stand out like a sore thumb in the bunch of bubbly teens. He had always admired her for that but there was nothing romantic about it. They made a great science team and were good friends too. There was a time some light years ago, when Nirav felt a flutter for Mira while listening to Freddie Mercury’s voice. But in the free-for-all-emotions phase that was teenage, he didn’t take it seriously.

Now, twelve years later, after a successful and a rather long stint at a research lab in Germany, Nirav was thrilled that he was going to meet someone from his childhood.

He followed her home and cautiously approached her. Mira had already parked her car and was busy taking out groceries from it.

It was her alright, Nirav thought! And how she had changed!

Mira was genuinely happy too when she saw Nirav.

One coffee led to another and pretty soon he was a regular fixture at their house. Anand was happy that Mira had someone to swap her science stories with.

Over coffee and conversation, Nirav started dropping subtle hints of an opportunity that Mira might be interested in at his organization. Mira, through apprehensive in the beginning about working after a long gap, gave it a try and was suitably hooked. She wondered how she could have missed this exhilarating thing all along and slowly lost track of the life she had before she joined work.

Nirav was a great team-mate, he had been nothing but wonderful ever since she joined work. He was a great support. Together, they rekindled the past glory of their School’s science team. Life seemed like a series of successful events and she was having a ball.

In the exhilaration of everything surrounding her new job, Mira spent less and less time with her own family. Varun’s football practice and some rare-and-few vacations with Anand took backseat.

She was going to make up for it, she told herself every time but that never happened. The backseat things slowly avalanched into a million things she could no longer make up for.

****

Anand had a hard time comprehending the whole situation. He always tried to gauge it as an outsider-looking-in but would soon give it up, as he felt hugely inadequate for not giving Mira what she wanted. What did Nirav give that he couldn’t? Where did it go so wrong?

He thought he had it all...a dependable job, a loving wife and a great kid. But it had all come tumbling apart.

Why did he fail at the only long, successful relationship?

What is wrong with him?

Sure, he wasn’t giving enough time before Mira started working, but what did she do after she got into the job?

That’s when the epiphany slowly seeped in.

Nobody is perfect and nothing lasts forever.

Being in a successful relationship doesn’t always mean that it is for keeps, even if the relationship is something as seemingly permanent as marriage.

People change, relationships break, marriages fail.

He felt his hard heart begin to soften just a little.

Mira hadn’t been home in months. True - what she left behind wasn’t a home. But it had slowly become a prison of his making. No one could rescue him from that place. He had to rescue himself.

***************************************************************

My name is Nandana. I'm 25 and a techie by profession.When I'm not finding bugs in code, I watch movies, sketch Manga characters for my yet-to-be-started comic strip and fill various word documents creating characters for my yet-to-be-started(duh!) novel. I love reading and travelling. Bit of a photography enthusiast. For now, that's all you need to know :) And oh btw, criticism invited for the above piece

August 21, 2012

Rat poison. Resignation swept him in waves as he reviewed his decision
mentally. Mona wasn’t at home and life wouldn’t present him a better
opportunity. Life. The humor of the morbid thought didn’t escape him
and his lips curved into a crooked smile. He twisted the cap open. If
life can make me laugh in my proposed finality then I am not done yet,
he smiled emptying the bottle in the drain.

As I enter the world of blogosphere, making my thoughts and writing public for the world out there to hear for the first time, I begin to muse over the different phases of my life, where I’ve had to take that first step forward, to make a new beginning.

It didn’t matter what my age was or what the big leap was, on almost all those counts I nearly turned my back. It was not always the case of lack of self-esteem or confidence. It was mostly this fear of letting that one single step define my whole life. What I failed to foresee was that though that moment did make a significant impact in my life thereon, my life didn’t have to depend on that singular incident unless I let it happen. Let me explain.

From the age of 7 (that’s as far as I can remember), the single most question that I hated and apparently the only question that people who met me had to ask me was this: ‘What do you want to become when you grow up?’

And I always gave them a blank stare in answer. And people were always surprised that the child who was constantly her talkative self, who would go on and on chattering about all that she knew about, speaking a mile a minute, would go all silent, blinking at you when you asked that question. One simple question that all the kids her age would have a ready-made answer for.

As a child, I was very bright (I still am :P). I learnt very quickly, and I always did very well in school. I excelled in academics, took music lessons and impressed my super-strict teacher (thankfully I have a good singing voice, which according to my mom, I am wasting away), mastered 4 different foreign languages by the age of 13, won all those quiz competitions. And my parents weren’t even the over-driving types, constantly badgering me to excel on all fronts. It was me. I wanted to do it all, learn them all. Why? I was scared. Scared that I didn’t know what I really wanted to do with my life. Confused as to how people were able to answer you “Engineering”, “Medicine”, “Sciences”, “Journalism” with such conviction that you thought they had it all figured about life.

The one thing I was sure about was I would never become a Sportsperson. I always fell on my face in any running competition, thanks to my wonderful hand-leg coordination (On retrospect, I should have ruled out Dance as a career as well, but the fact that I loved attention never let me eliminate that possibility, I guess :P) and always stood last in any other sporting event as well. When I read Harry Potter, the best thing I could relate to was Hermoine’s constant fear of failure. Only my fear was what if I failed to decipher what I really wanted to do with my future and made the wrong choice.

So when it came to the first important turn of my life, entering senior school and picking up a group of my choice, I turned to my Chemistry teacher for she and I had a great rapport. She was someone with whom I could talk about the million questions in my head and not worry about sounding like a nutcase. We decided that I would take Biotechnology (CBSE had just introduced Biotech in the curriculum for Class XI and XII and mine was the second batch) not because I had a flair for Biology but because I couldn’t choose among any of those groups which had been around for years, which everyone else was taking up. I was glad that I still hadn’t closed out my other options, for I couldn’t be pressured to take entrance tests for Medicine and Engineering like my Biology and Computer Science counterparts, but I could still do them if I wanted to. I also had this thought about pursuing my quest for learning languages and making a career out of it.

In Senior School, I did well. So exceptionally well in Biotechnology that I topped all of CBSE. What next? Naturally everyone expected me to further my studies in that field and make something out of myself. But I thought otherwise. Just because I did well in something, it didn’t mean I could do the same for the rest of my life, is it? What if I failed, when everyone expected me to shine in a field that they knew I was already good at? I turned away and decided to get a degree in Physics instead. Yes. A random choice, just like that with no basis or no real interest in Physics either. But fate has this wonderful habit of steering me in the direction of something I turned away from. Some random uncle had sent an application for a reputed Engineering college that offered Biotechnology and I had simply applied to it and forgotten about it altogether.

One week before my classes in the other college for Physics, I got a call from this Engineering College offering me a seat for any branch I wanted. Now this college was located in a different city, so it meant I had to stay at the hostel. They had me there. Bags were packed, goodbyes were said and off I move to the hostel, err the college, to get an Engineering degree in Biotechnology.

Four years of college whizzed past in a blur (like it happens to everyone) and I would say it’s been the best four years of my single (umm, single = in a relationship but not married) life. I did do well in College but I still wasn’t sure if it was what I wanted. And I again based my decision on random chance. My then boyfriend-now husband went to the US to get his Master’s degree and there I go. I followed him here a year later to get a Master’s degree too – this time in Chemical Engineering!

By now most of my extended family began to think that I was getting a bit crazy for they didn’t see where I was going. How could they when I am still figuring that out myself? I finished up my Master’s and started working as a free-lance designer for a reputed Fuel Cell company. And I love what I am doing. The nature of my job has very little to do with what I learnt in four years of undergrad and two years of Master’s but I love what I am doing. While I have a job that I love to support myself financially, I am still deciding if I should get that MBA in Finance (no, really :P)

(image courtesy: Google)

As I finished up my degree, my parents insisted I get married. Enough to get me panic-stricken. What if I fail? What if this man who has been professing his undying love (okay that’s a bit too dramatic, even for me) for me for over 5 years now suddenly realizes that I am not good enough? What if he thinks I don’t take care for him like his mother did? What if he thinks my cooking sucks? What if he thinks I sleep too much?

Though I hated the idea of getting married at 24, I couldn’t help but relish the entire wedding preparation (through Skype of course) with child-like naiveté. I enjoyed the glamour, the sheer material pleasure of jewelry and silk and basked in the attention – in the 3-week span I was in India for my own wedding.

What I did fail to see was that I was married to a man who was in and out thoroughly supportive of me and my decisions. He completes me in a way I can never explain in words. He never complains if I feel too lazy to make dinner. He cooks for us both or we end up watching a movie with an ice cream. He gives me a hug and takes me out for lunch when I complain about being bogged down by work. He patiently hears me out when I go on a rant about my fight with mom that morning and tells me that my mom was probably right. I have been married for only 8 months now but I already am sure about one thing – though I wasn’t sure if this is what I wanted from life, now that I have it, I know this is what I would have yearned for if I knew in the beginning.

You will never know what you will really want. Life is just a progressive journey of you realizing your wants and desires and passions at each stage and then you follow it. You later realize you’ve grown out of it and you follow something else. Some of us make that kind of a hop-hop from one thing to another only in our passive hobbies. We listen to one genre of music and then we get bored and move on to another. And for some like me, it happens throughout the life – a process to identify oneself.

I keep testing myself, constantly trying to stretch my limits. My aspirations and dreams change and the quest for learning and the search for knowledge continue. And I have my constants too – my husband (it still feels weird to call him that :P), my family who always stand by me when I am at the crossroads. Taking that first step towards something is always difficult but when you give it your best shot and more, you will never regret it. Noone but you can define your own success and failure.

PS: My parents are visiting us next month and mom is bringing me my electronic shruti box so I can resume some singing. She still thinks I should have become a classical singer :D

PS 1: That post was TOOOO long for a first post I guess. I hope you don’t belt me for that :P

PS 2: Thanks for making it until here. The post already gave you my life’s biography. Nevertheless, let me make it all formal.

I am Pavithra, 25 and am a full-time wife and Engineer. I take the daughter+daughter-in-law avatar over weekends on Skype J First time blogger, though I do write often otherwise. I’ve been following DOV for months now so I decided to give blogging a first shot here J

August 20, 2012

I came across this blog
quite randomly and it brought a smile to my face. The idea had a novelty that
appealed. I went through a number of posts and while I did I found that there were
so many expressions in every blog that a girl can identify with. There is so
much wealth and beauty in her mind that she wants to put forth. Women are
always close to my heart. I believe they are born of great spirit and to begin
with I am going to salute the channel of energy here. Kudos to all of you! Having said that, I would like to tell you all
that most of my blog posts are going to be fiction so I hope you enjoy my
amateurish attempt at it and if you don’t, I hope you are kind enough not to
tell me how it bored the socks out of you. J But
today as my first post I am just going to write in about something that formed
an impression when I went through this blog in general.

I am going to talk about
something that you all can align with. Strength. I read some blog posts here
which had an element of morbidity to it despite its theme of lifting spirits. I
wondered then how can a woman who derives energy from so many different sources
let her spirit dip so very easily. I might have been reading too much between
the lines (we girls think so muchJ) but
yet even with so many beautiful and thought evoking posts, some of them
particularly held such a stark contrast of a glaring void. That is disturbing
to find in any girl who displays such maturity with her writing otherwise! Strength
or the belief of lack of it can add many shades to our lives. Everyone is strong. There is no degree of
comparison to it. But does everyone want to get to a point where they want to
test how strong they are. No one would volunteer for that kind of an experience
and once they have it they wouldn’t want a repeat. No one wants that kind of a
medallion. No one who completely understands the essence of the experience
related to the word would like to be told “ You are a strong person.”. A friend
of mine who lost her parents once told me” Everyone calls me strong but you
know I really don’t want to be. I just want them back” It isn’t easy and it is
never the best of experiences. That is
why I say strength is an acquired taste J

Having said that, everyday
our life is sectioned into so many parts and every day we come across multiple
things that don’t go our way or get on our nerves. Sometimes it goes a step
further. So many relations, so many conflicts. Every day we put a little of
ourselves aside for someone else and at some point we rue it but we would still
do it again. How many times have you given up on something small or big to accommodate
your sense of happiness for someone else? It is quite nearly impossible that
any of you can confidently say “never” to the above. That is strength too.
Strength doesn’t have to be expressed in big things but also in the small
things you do every day. Strength is no different from discovering happiness.
Those small moments that you would never give a second thought to otherwise. It
doesn’t matter today how small you feel, you will always have the strength to
rise above it. It doesn’t matter how many people or how many situations
indicate otherwise, nothing can dampen that strength once you choose to express
it. Conflicts won’t cease but you can always learn to do a balancing act. It is
an acquired and practiced habit in everyone. Do not attach a lot of importance
to things, people and situations that went wrong in the past and hurt yourself
again and again(if that makes any sense J).
That is truly a big strength. To accomplish it would make you a stronger AND a
better(~happier) person. It would free you of your own bindings. There is a
chance to be happier every day for there are so many awesome moments that
happen in a day! For me it is as simple as my favorite song just playing on the
radio or my coffee turning out perfect.

I will not want to go on and
on about it since my audience is a well-rounded group of individuals who are
intelligent enough to understand their own individuality J I will conclude with Swami
Vivekananda’s belief that weakness doesn’t exist and one mustn’t give birth to
that belief to cripple one selves. J As
you can see I am a hopeless preacher (and that is why I never volunteer with
advice)

Stay awesome and share a
smile! J Look
forward to my next post and if you have slept through this one hope you had a
good siesta ;)

P.S. Image attached is one
among one of my favorite ones on enticing expressions courtesy Google. Hope it
conveyed what it was supposed to J

P. P. S. After that just to have your senses horrified, I am attaching a video that repelled me...

August 3, 2012

Few years ago, I had lost everything in life. Work was fucked, family life was unstable and my love life was in the dumpsters. When I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, I decided that no, I'm not gonna give up. I did not want to succumb and live like a loser. The day I realised that, I wrote this. Sometime in 2010. And since that day on I have only bounced back. Nobody came to support me back then and people were only hurling phrases like 'let go', 'forget it' etc etc. But I believed in myself. I decided that I'll make peace with the melancholy and not ignore it. I then accepted the situation and worked my way out of it.

And here I am today, almost 2 years later. I have a job that I love, a supporting family and the love of my life to whom I'm getting married soon. Life seems like a fairy tale today. The only way I get to appreciate it is because of the past. I'm glad I held on to myself and crawled back into sanity and then to happiness. Else, I wouldn't be around to write this. Not today, not then.

Believe in yourself. No one and nothing else matters. So here we go, 'I Believe'.